From the people at Manoa Chocolate, the mission of Craft Chocolate TV is to educate fellow cacao farmers, chocolate makers, chocolate lovers, and the general public on the art and process of bean to bar chocolate making. After over a decade of trial and error we want to bring to light all the various steps and complexities that go into making the most delicious chocolate possible. Enjoy!
Thanks for all the videos. Thanks to your videos, we have managed to create a vegan and gluten bean to bar business in uk with no previous experience/knowledge about chocolate and has been running for 4 years. Thanks so much
Wow! This means so much to us! Comments like these are why we do this! This is the best reward we could ask for! Congratulations on 4 years and here’s to many more to come!
Thanks for that. I am making chocolate and I have a nice brand but honestly I am struggling to grow and understanding marketing. My goal really is to build a niche of clients that order my product online because of the quality and keep the buisness relatively small. Just me taking care of all the process and keep experimenting, in particular with ageing with spirits, to make great high quality chocolate. I know I have some great bars (I won also some awards) but the clients I have are very inconsistent. Chocolate seems to be a very emotional driven type of product.
We still share your struggles in regards to understanding growth and marketing and we learn as we go as well. Defining your goals for your business is important. We also know makers who do everything themselves. It is possible, but it's really difficult and ends up consuming a lot of your life and time. Chocolate is definitely an emotional product! We have emotional connections to it formed from childhood onward.
Wow great message from you Dlyan. I am very interested in learning and taking courses from you. chocolate manufacturing is one of my dream, master like you!
Totally agree about relentless optimism and focusing on the vision. Seeing your growth is helpful because I don't want to do that. Big manufacturing with all those machines... not exactly my vision. My little chocolate making venture in my business is just a branch so it's difficult to hone in on all the details of my tree I'm growing, as an analogy. I'm still in the first few years but gaining momentum. Now to adjust the sails.
I am a lifelong learner and want to grow and make chocolate for the educational value only. I don't want to sell it to someone else, or produce for retail... I just love chocolate ;o). That being said, this video is spot on for those who want to start a business selling chocolate.
Hi I’m from Ghana, am planning to start chocolate making I have been watching most of your videos and is very helpful, I can’t wait to see you starting the series chocolate course. Thank you.
Hello. Great video. I've watched many others in the past as well. I am originally from Boston, Ma, but moved to Ecuador 8 years ago. Since Ecuador has a lot of high quality cacao trees I got interested in the whole process of chocolate making. I purchased some very high-quality beans from a chocolate business that failed. I also bought a melanger, and molds. I started making chocolate bars, and have to say the whole process, by hand, was extremely laborious. I contemplated starting a business, but realized my passion, such as I see you have, wasn't there. So now, it's just small hobby:) Keep up the great videos:)
Ecuador does have exceptional beans! We have sourced from there for years. It's a really rewarding (and delicious) hobby to have! It is also, as you mention, very labourious. The business side of it even more so! I think it's great that you decided to maintain it as a hobby and passion! Often the best and most rewarding hobbies are the ones that don't demand we profit from them. Then it is truly all about the love of chocolate! All of the best with your hobby.
This is great content. I love the advice. Having started an ice cream business and a bean to bar chocolate business, I know how damn hard it is and how lonely it can be. Everything you said was100% on the mark. Thanks for being such an honest and transparent voice of our industry. People need to hear this as its not all roses and Champagne. There is also plenty of nervous sleepless nights where one wonders if you are the biggest idiot on earth... but then I wouldn't trade any of it for the world.
Masochists, maybe, but biggest idiots on Earth? Also maybe. Just kidding. It can be a lonely road at times, but the community you attract when pursuing your goals and passions is the biggest payoff in the end. It's definitely not all roses and champagne, but we love it! Thanks for watching and for your encouragement!
@@CraftChocolateTV One subject that I often wish was covered is how you managed certain aspects of scaling up. Going from a one man show, to giving up control to your staff must have been tricky. I know it is for me as it's not easy when you are meticulous about the details and doing things right. Also, when you made the jump to ball mills, how did you manage to sell that huge leap in capacity? Did you hire dedicated sales staff or did you outsource that job to a distributor? Anyway, just my 2 cents on subjects that I would find interesting
@@True-id5ck The growth part is definitely an episode's worth to get the information down. We have grown organically throughout our journey, letting demand dictate when to take the next steps as far scaling up. As far as mainaining the meticulous levels of detail, that is always ongoing. Finding great people who trust in the vision is key. At any given point in the week, there's still a good chance you'll find Dylan working on one of the production lines as well. The majority of our business is still local here in Hawaii, so we're able to do sales in-house, but we do have a distributor on the mainland. Those are some short forms answers to your questions. Hope that helps!
No, we receive the samples as raw beans after they've been fermented and dried, but chocolate makers will want to do their own roast profiles to test the beans.
That's exciting! India has a growing cacao and chocolate industry. At least for the time being, we do not offer private consultations, but we'll continue to offer videos about the business of craft chocolate! Have you watched our library of episodes?
It depends on the climate you're in, but they can dry really quickly. Anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour, but you'll be able to tell just by looking at them.
10% added butter is quite a bit compared to other makers I’ve talked to. Have you played with lower (or no) butter additions? As a consumer and IICCT taster, I tend to prefer less butter addition. I do enjoy your bars quite a bit, would just be interested in tasting your quality Hawaiian cacao at full force.
To each their own, but for us, 10% butter gives us the consistency we like best for mouth feel, but more importantly to better taste the notes of the cacao. It helps the cacao shine. We suspect more and more makers will start doing this.
This is crazy... How does a scummy cake maker refuse to bake a cake for an LGBT wedding and be told "it's ok, you don't have to, it's your god given Merican right not to", yet you get sued for this? Anyway, I can kind of imagine this happening with a government website, but not a chocolate website!! You're not providing a necessity.....well, chocolate is kinda a necessity, but you understand. lol Possible solution - How about asking a friend/family member to place an order, while also sending you a strongly-worded email letting you know your website is not accessible to the visually impaired? Nah, just sue...🤣
We do feel websites should all be accessible and that chocolate is for everyone! A head's up would have been all it took for us to right the website and fix the accessible issues we had instead of a lawsuit. Hopefully this helps other avoid our costly mistake and more websites become accessible!
Men ! Its amazing i follow ypu from spain im creating an cacao import company here in spain i would like to talk about that with you would be amazing! Thanks
thank you Dylan! I’m starting my own small cacao farm and your videos are very helpful to me esp that I’m trying to add value to my end products by not just selling beans. 😂
Hi Dylan thanks for another informative video. Question: how many individual fermentations do these boxes last for or what is the normal lifespan of the box would you estimate?
Roughly 3m spacing might be considered “typical”, but it really depends on many factors specific to place, terrain, goals, scale, etc. etc. etc. There’s not a one-size-fits-all answer
Maybe don't take a big leap, but smaller steps to start out? You're in the right place! We have and will continue to release videos to help make the process and industry less intimidating!
I don't sell directly, but I have product pages with links to the different retailers those products are sold by. Am I still at risk even though my site does not directly sell anything?
Likely, no, but all websites should be accessible and the extra steps to make it so are relatively easy and just good practice for your community. We built our website ourselves and just didn’t know we had accessibility issues until we were sued.
The minimum is quite a lot. Our single origin recipe is 70% cacao (of which, 10% is cacao butter) and 30% sugar. But makers vary in ratio. Have you found your 'sweet spot' as far as percentage that you enjoy most?
Craft chocolate for me is linked to the attention to detail that the producer is investing in the entire process. From sourcing the beans until packing the tablet. Also craft chocolate aims to elevate chocolate from a simple sweet treat to a gourmet experience, much like fine wine or specialty coffee.
Scale is an interesting debate, whether it is accurate or not. For us, to remain at a small artisinal level defeats our purpose - to have as big of an impact on the industry as we can, by supporting cacao producers and offering our customers and community exceptional chocolate. To do that, we must scale (and so must the industry). At a certain point, whether we're craft or not is not important, so long as we are having the biggest positive impact as we can on our community.
Sometimes I organize cacao work-shops and receive the same question 1 month ago. To me craft chocolate is artisan work, orientated to quality - from raw products to customer happy feeling after he eat chocolate.
We love Zotter and look to them as an excellent model to strive for. Whether we're 'craft' or not does not change our drive to help support and build a thriving cacao and chocolate industry in Hawaii. In order to do that and have a significant impact, we have to continue to grow. If scale rules us out, sobeit!
I believe that Craft chocolate would be an individual/entity that provides specialty products vs a mass production facility. That has a primary focus on market share and ROI
This is the exact same discussion currently taking place about specialty coffee where the designation is related to a minimum Q grader sensory score of 80 points, meeting green coffee defect grading, and traceability. I guess I have often thought of craft chocolate in an analogous way with its emphasis on flavor development at origin via good fermentation and drying and traceability of lots.
I always thought craft chocolate was bean to bar, but a bit more DIY. That being said, I think if you grow you business from a bean to bar at home company to a huge factory, but still keeping the same production rules and values, the definition would still apply to you. But seeing as a lot of big companies are starting to split from just making pure chocolate products to making candy and other products, you could argue that craft chocolate has very little todo with that company anymore because it doesn't describe as a whole.
One of the common arguments against someone being craft is the scale, for sure. As there is no clear definition within the craft chocolate industry, it's an interesting question to wrestle with. Once a company starts making candy bars instead of chocolate bars, that's a pretty clear tipping point, you're right.
